A guide to learning Italian

Italian, which is also an official language of the EU, is officially spoken in Italy (with a population of 57 million, about half that of Japan) and in southern Switzerland (the Ticino region, where cities such as Locarno and Lugano are located). It is also one of the official languages favored by intellectuals in Somalia, a former colony in Africa. However, the area in which Italian is actually spoken is actually much wider. This is because many Italians have a history of immigrating to various parts of the world. For example, it is said that the proportion of Italians among the population of the United States, Argentina, and Australia is quite high.

It seems that the language and cultural traditions of their home country have been passed down not only to the first generation who first settled in these areas, but also to their second and third generation descendants. For this reason, in some of the above countries, there are broadcasts, newspapers, and publications in Italian. Furthermore, as time went on, many Italians immigrated to various parts of Europe, including Germany and Northern Europe, so Italian is often spoken in those areas as well. Furthermore, there are many junior high schools, high schools, vocational schools, and universities in Europe where Italian is offered as a second or third foreign language. Looking at this, we can see that there are surprisingly many more areas where Italian can be spoken than commonly believed.

Recently, Italian cuisine has become more popular, and there are more words related to food and ingredients. Words like pasta, gelato, cappuccino, and espresso seem to have become well established. In sports, calcio, meaning soccer, totocalcio, which was also introduced in Japan, and serie A, the highest level A league, are well known. The name of Ferrari, the car manufacturer that is active in F1, is also well known.

Italian is often said to be a Latin language, but more accurately, it is one of the Romance languages. It is a language that was born from Latin, the language of ancient Rome, and other languages in the same family include French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Among them, it is most closely related to Spanish. Let me give you some examples.

"Book" and "house" are spelled exactly the same and are pronounced almost the same. "Flower" is spelled a little differently, but is very similar. Not only nouns, but the last two adjective examples are also very similar in both spelling and sound. Not only at the word level, but even when they are more complete phrases, the difference between the two is not that great.

As you can see, the article un, which corresponds to the English a, is the same. Also, the interrogative word at the beginning of the second example, which means "how," is very similar to come and cómo. The word order is also the same in all the examples above.

Not only Spanish, but the Romance languages listed above all have similar grammatical structures. Compared to English, the grammar is more complex. This is because nouns, articles, and adjectives are differentiated between masculine and feminine, there are many verb tenses, and person conjugations are complex. This is a general characteristic of Western European languages, including Germanic languages such as German. On the other hand, Italian pronunciation is familiar to Japanese people and relatively easy. This is because the phonological systems of both languages are centered around similar vowels, which is a great advantage when learning. Now, let's look at how to read the Italian alphabet.

The 21 characters above are the ones we normally use (fewer than English!). The five characters marked with * have a slightly different pronunciation, but are only used in some proper nouns and archaic words.

Next, let's introduce a few everyday expressions such as greetings. For pronunciation, you can basically read it in romanized characters, but there are some exceptions.

Recently, an "electronic dictionary" containing both of the above dictionaries has been released.
In addition to these, several so-called compact dictionaries have also been published.

■Musashi University Foreign Language Learning Award and Encouragementapplies.